erceiving an overly zealous culture of copyright
protection, a group of law and technology scholars are setting
up Creative Commons, a nonprofit company that will develop
ways for artists, writers and others to easily designate their
work as freely shareable.
Creative Commons, which is to be officially announced this
week at a technology conference in Santa Clara, Calif., has
nearly a million dollars in start-up money. The firm's
founders argue that the expansion of legal protection for
intellectual property, like a 1998 law extending the term of
copyright by 20 years, could inhibit creativity and
innovation. But the main focus of Creative Commons will be on
clearly identifying the material that is meant to be shared.
The idea is that making it easier to place material in the
public domain will in itself encourage more people to do so.
The firm's first project is to design a set of licenses
stating the terms under which a given work can be copied and
used by others. Musicians who want to build an audience, for
instance, might permit people to copy songs for noncommercial
use. Graphic designers might allow unlimited copying of
certain work as long as it is credited.
The goal is to make such licenses machine-readable, so that
anyone could go to an Internet search engine and seek images
or a genre of music, for example, that could be copied without
legal entanglements.
"It's a way to mark the spaces people are allowed to walk
on," said Lawrence Lessig, a leading intellectual property
expert who will take a partial leave from Stanford Law School
for the next three years to serve as the chairman of Creative
Commons.
Inspired in part by the free-software movement, which has
attracted thousands of computer programmers to contribute
their work to the public domain, Creative Commons ultimately
plans to create a "conservancy" for donations of valuable
intellectual property whose owners might opt for a tax break
rather than selling it into private hands.
The firm's board of directors includes James Boyle, an
intellectual property professor at Duke Law School; Hal
Abelson, a computer science professor at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology; and Eric Saltzman, executive director
of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law
School.
